Job Opportunity for Senior Product Manager, Platform at Wikimedia Foundation

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Design Systems, Platform Senior Product Manager to join our recently formed Platform Product management team, reporting to the Director of Platform Product Management. As a Platform Senior Product Manager, you will be responsible for working closely with our engineering teams across the foundation to build and deliver technical capabilities that create value, support our mission, and positions our technical stack to sustainably grow and scale to empower the free-knowledge community. Platform Product Managers possess deep expertise in various areas of technology, serving as Subject Matter Experts to development and non-development audiences alike.   

Wikipedia is one of the largest internet properties in the world, visited by 1 billion people a month across 280 different languages. Our foundational technology supports all of our properties, products, and offerings that empower the global free-knowledge community to produce and consume knowledge. 

Due to our scale, commitment to opensource, and our desire to support the infrastructure of free knowledge, it is no easy task to build and maintain foundational technology. To deliver key capabilities that are needed, Platform Product Managers must develop strong understandings of internal and external clients, leverage their product management skills to distill capabilities from user needs, and partner closely with partners in engineering to identify, design, and build technical capabilities that support products and services that unlock value. 

In this role, the Design Systems Senior Product Manager will be responsible for developing capabilities, solutions, and platforms that enable the Foundation to improve consistency within the user experience, increase efficiency by focusing on reusability, speed up our time-to-market for features, and simplify maintenance of our front-end code and systems. This will involve guiding the development and adoption of a new design system for Wikimedia projects, improving Server Side Rendering (SSR), mitigating redundancies, etc. Platform Product Managers will be working closely with one or more engineering teams on a daily basis and will have to collaborate closely within the team in order to deliver solutions at scale.

You are responsible for:

• Developing a deep understanding of critical areas of our front-end technology stack, identifying opportunities to improve, extend, and/or leverage existing and new technologies to deliver against our mission and strategy
• Translating product/technical strategy into a roadmap containing well-defined and prioritized user stories and features 
• Working with the Design Systems Team to manage incoming requests, including triaging, clarifying, generating estimates, prioritizing, and managing stakeholder expectations
• Establishing clear guidelines and methodologies to support development, adoption, and ongoing maintenance of a Design System
• Uncovering and understanding client needs and translating them into requirements and user stories
• Ensuring that requirements are fully understood and implementation plans match expectations
• Partnering with the Movement to assess  and address technical risks
• Working closely with engineering teams to communicate the product vision, clarify use cases and requirements, and resolve questions and issues that arise during development.
• Clearly defining success criteria for testing and product acceptance
• Using both qualitative and quantitative methods to measure the impact of your work
• Serving as a product evangelist and subject matter expert to the technical community
• Establishing and analyzing important metrics related to design system usage that inform product decisions
• Managing a governance and contribution model that facilitates collaboration across designers, engineers, and the community

Skills and Experience:

• 3+ years of experience designing and building web and/or mobile products as a technical product manager, software engineer, or equivalent role
• Proven project, communication, and time management skills
• Agility and flexibility to work with multiple different teams, projects, and technologies while delivering value and impact
• Ability to partner and work closely with internal teams, including developers, engineers, architects, security, and product teams.
• Strong understanding of development concepts
• Demonstrated experience prioritizing work
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical requirements to non-technical audiences, as well as turn non-technical requirements into specs that engineering teams can execute against.
• Ability to solve complex business problems to maximize value while balancing technical constraints
• Able to draft documentation and visualizations that clarify technical concepts to non-technical audiences and vice-versa
• Direct experience in companies or initiatives that have pulled together disparate products or services into a common experience for customers.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in relevant work experience
• Working closely with design and engineering leadership in evolving the product over time

Qualities that are important to us:

• Problem-solver with a passion and willingness to learn and dive-deep into technical details
• Possess a growth mindset with ability to identify additional skills, knowledge, and/or expertise required and the drive to develop themselves where needed  

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Familiarity with PHP, JSON, Python, and/or Javascript (Vue.js)
• Experience using, building, and/or contributing to a design system
• Experience working with Design tools such as Figma
• Experience working with microservice architectures
• Experience with open-source technology 
• Experience interacting with free and open-source software projects and communities
• Experience editing Wikipedia or contributing to other wiki projects

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive.